I’ve seen photographic advice such as “your pictures need to tell a story”, and I’m thinking; nah, bro; I’m good. I mean, if I take a picture of a bee pollenating a rosemary bush, what story should that tell? I mean, other than the atmosphere of the moment, the light, the feeling frozen in time?

I’m freezing visual moments, you fit them into your own personal story any way you like. Sometimes there’s a story behind why I like to take pictures of a certain kind, but you will hardly see it in the picture itself. For instance, the horizontal light of the sunset taken through an innocuous object that just happens to be there:

The light is always out of focus, beyond reach and beyond resolution, and in a moment it’s gone, and magic is lost from the object that seemed to contain it. The story is the world itself – how it catches the light of God at specific moments, and then the light is gone and you see that it was never truly of this world, that there is nothing special here, and everything that makes it appear special is beyond it. Also, it’s the story about how I can’t go there yet, which is why those pictures always have a tinge of pain and nostalgia in them.

Sometimes there is no story – the reason why I like taking pictures of insects in flight is simply because it’s hard and I like the challenge, and when I make it, sometimes it looks magical and I like it because of that.

No particular story there, but feel free to insert your own. 🙂

Rainbow light on cobwebs started without any high aspirations of storytelling either – I just found it pretty.

One would think it’s chromatic aberration created by the lens, but nope, you can see it with the naked eye. It’s something about the cobweb breaking light like a string of tiny prisms. The lens just kept it there without interfering, which is why I love those optically perfect lenses.

Later, I understood that it actually fits a story of this world and its creator, who makes his cobwebs attractive with stolen light, so that he could devour his victims here. The real spiders of course prefer to keep their traps hidden and invisible, but that one prefers his traps to shine with the stolen light of God.

So, you can find stories there even if they were unintentional. Whenever I deliberately try to tell a story with photography, it feels pretentious and cringy, so I try to aviod it.

Cringe. 🙂